São Paulo, Brazil – Brazil’s deadliest jetliner crash was an accident foretold. For months, air-safety concerns have been aired in congressional hearings, and pilots and traffic controllers have worried for years about the short, slippery runways at Brazil’s busiest airport.
Landing on the 6,362-foot- long runway at São Paulo’s Congonhas airport is so challenging that pilots liken it to an aircraft carrier – if they don’t touch down precisely within the tarmac’s first 1,000 feet, they’re warned to pull up and circle around again. The ungrooved runway becomes even more treacherous in the rain.
The runway appears to have been a key factor in Tuesday’s crash, and critics condemned President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s government Wednesday for failing to invest in safety measures adopted by other urban airports.
189 dead, 11 hospitalized
None of the 186 people on board survived, TAM Linhas Aereas SA chief executive Marco Antonio Bologna said Wednesday. Three TAM workers on the ground also died, and 11 were hospitalized.
Firefighters pulled at least 171 charred bodies from the site where the Airbus 320 crashed, igniting in a 1,830-degree fireball.
The plane slammed into a gas station and a TAM Airlines building after narrowly clearing the airport’s perimeter fence and rush-hour traffic on a surrounding highway.
“What appears to have happened is that he didn’t manage to land and he tried to take off again,” said Capt. Marcos, a spokesman for the São Paulo Fire Department, who would not release his last name in accordance with department guidelines.
Also, video footage of the landing shows TAM Flight 3054 from Porto Alegre coming in faster than other planes, said Sen. Deonstenes Torres, chief of a Senate commission investigating problems with Brazilian civil aviation.
Torres said the plane’s two black boxes would be sent to the U.S. for analysis.
International air-safety experts have long warned of the danger of just such an accident on the short runway at São Paulo’s airport, especially in heavy rain.
Only the day before, two other planes skidded off the runway’s end.
But Bologna said it was too early to say what went wrong.
“We have to wait for the results of the investigations to know the cause,” he said. “It would be premature to make any assumptions about the runway.”
President condemned
Critics condemned Silva’s government for its failure to fix Brazil’s air-traffic problems in the months since 154 people were killed in the September collision of a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 with a small jet over the Amazon rain forest.
“It was a tragedy foretold,” said political commentator Lucia Hippolito. “The government has done nothing because of administrative inefficiency and simple incompetence.”
Silva has been unable to wrest control of the civil aviation system from the military, which oversees Brazil’s air- traffic controllers and has filled top positions at the national aviation agency with political appointees with little or no experience.
The accident is certain to have political ramifications, if only because the dead included Rep. Julio Redecker, 51, a leader of the opposition Brazilian Social Democracy Party and a vocal critic of Silva’s handling of the aviation crisis.
